CAS behavior

Summary

The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky
developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time
spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology,
psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of
adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight
challenges for scientific research on behavior.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's
details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured
to successfully enter niches we now occupy.

Behave

In Robert Sapolsky's book
'Behave' he binds his research on baboons to the complex
adaptive systems (

The Behavior

Sapolsky explains the approach of the book. In the first
part some good or bad behavior occurs driven by selection of a
strategy. Typically the context and meaning of the
behavior are more complex than the mechanics. The
complexity can
only be understood by incorporating all of the following
aspects:

impacts the frontal
cortex: like distraction and heavy cortical load, it can
dissociate the frontocortical importance signal about some
action from the Boolean do/don't do it signal, explaining why
you may do exactly the wrong thing under stress.

Response-focused strategies where you aim to cope with the
emotions after they start occurring by thinking about
sitting still and breathing deeply. Sapolsky argues
this is not very effective since it increases the activity
of the amygdala.

Sapolsky argues the frontal cortex gets its metaphorical
motivation to do the harder thing from the brains dopaminergic
reward systems.

neurons assess the time
delay. A flexible arrangement that supports delayed
gratification. Differences in the volume of these
different agents in different people results in the variations
in effectiveness of performing delayed gratification.
Sapalsky adds that humans can delay gratification for huge
amounts of

Symbols: National flag, Team shirt; also influence
behavior. Cues about group identity demonstrate the
complex nature of the signal processing. Asian American
women primed to think about racial identity performed better in
a mathematics test than those primed to think about
gender. Sapolsky notes that their assumptions about
females struggling at mathematics depend on cultural influences.

When women are present, or men are prompted to think about
women, men increase their risk-taking, spend more on luxuries
that signal status, and act more aggressively. Except when
men's status has been achieved prosocially in which case the
presence of women makes the men more prosocial.

Males have more testosterone and are more aggressive but
Sapolsky notes that aggression occurs even when castration has
removed testosterone from males. Sapolsky concludes
aggression is typically more about social learning than
testosterone. We reward aggression too often.
Testosterone has effects but they are hugely context dependent
and typically amplify preexisting tendencies. Testosterone
boosts impulsivity, risk taking and feeling good from such
activities. It also makes winning a fight feel good.
And it supports the formation of a dominance
hierarchy and encourages us to maintain status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. . Only during a
challenge does an increases in testosterone make aggression more
likely. When a person's pride depends on being prosocial
rising testosterone will increase acts of kindness.

In some species: Hyenas; females are dominant and more
aggressive than the males; Sapolsky concludes that androgens
can help make females aggressive but it undermines maternal
processes resulting in evolved compromises.

Some important debunking: Alcohol

Sapolsky notes alcohols impact on judgment. But he writes
it does not cause everyone to become aggressive. Instead
people prone to aggression do become aggressive as do people who
believe alcohol makes you aggressive. That second
situation demonstrates social learnings power to shape
biology.

Adolescence is only understood in the context of the
delayed frontal cortex's maturation, making it: frustrating,
great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive,
self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible and world
changing. Sapolsky adds it's when someone is most
likely to kill or be killed. A time of life of maximal
risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with
peers.

; is
dramatic and transformational. Adult female endocrine
function is cyclic but at puberty the activity is more
intermittent. Adolescent male brains also receive washes
of gonadal hormones and often suffer hypoxia from blood flow
diverted to the crotch.

criminal justice system has to
decide if adolescent criminals are to be considered fully in
control of their judgments. Sapolsky concludes that
Behave's scientific foundation demands
the transformation of the criminal justice system.

And, the eventual explanation for a massive drop in crime rates
observed starting in the 1990s, provides further evidence
of mother-infant bond's significance in humans: Stanford's
Donohue & Chicago's
Levitt identified that the drop in violence correlated with
state abortion legalization passed 20 years prior. The
problem was being born to a mother the child knows would prefer
you don't exist. Again Harlow's results confirmed Donohue
& Levitt's proposals. And the infant monkeys Harlow
wrecked had the full set of behaviors, but didn't know when to
use them effectively. Without mothers to teach them, they
had no social context.

time
soothing their children, maintaining contact, and facilitating
contact with other adults. They pick cooperative
games. They stress getting along, thinking of others,
accepting and adapting. These children see social
competence as taking someone else's perspective.

Nine long months

The demonstration that fetuses were affected by what they tasted
& heard outside
the womb encouraged interest among the public. For
our best and worst behaviors Sapolsky judges other neonatal
environmental influences are even more significant: Glands are
active in the fetus and their action is transformative, Hostile
external environment.

Part 3: So what do genes actually have to do with behaviors
we're interested in?

Sapolsky warns that candidate studies usually identify
tiny effects. Genome wide studies show that behaviors
are influenced by huge numbers of genes. That results
in non-specificity and context dependency of gene
effects.

Glucocorticoids gene/environment interactions have been
researched. The MR receptor gene allele AND
childhood abuse produce an amygdala that is hyper-reactive
to threat. Sapolsky notes research has looked at two
of the 20,000 human genes in a few of the astronomical
variety of environments. The situation is daunting!

that surround us have huge effects on how
individuals behave. These behaviors reflect the
culture the individuals were raised in as well as where they
live. He illustrates his case with:

Gender differences in mathematics where the more gender
equality the less difference there was in math scores with
Iceland's girls scoring better than boys, while most other
countries have boys scoring better especially in unequal
cultures like Turkey's.

Earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts
gender equality in today's culture.

Long term impacts - population density in 1500
significantly predicts how authoritarian a government was in
2000.

similarities attributed to their tough environments and
minimal rule of law and centralized government.
Thieves can easily steel a pastoralist's herd.
Sapolsky suggests this asymmetric issue results in:

Ecology significantly shapes culture. Sapolsky
notes that culture can then be exported and persist in
other environments. So most humans' beliefs
reflect the culture developed by preliterate Middle
Eastern pastoralists.

Sapolsky explains that people from the old South of the
US have a similar violent honor culture that results in
far more honor killings. And he notes with caveats,
historian David Hackett Fischer proposed this culture was
due to the large numbers of herders from Scotland, Ireland
and northern England.

Sapolsky argues that stratified agricultural societies
are better able to cope with unstable environments that
develop resource shortages - sequestoring mortality in the
lower classes -- and leveraging their chain of command to
support conquest. But he notes hunter-gatherers can
move in search of a better environment.

A religion reflects the values of the culture that
invented or adopted it, and it transmits those values

Religions foster the best and worst of our behaviors

It's complicated.

Hobbes or
Rousseau- how we got there

Sapolsky explains that contemporary evaluations of the
applicability of these philosophies leverage data:

Archaeological

Contemporary humans living in pre-state tribal societies

But there are definitional disagreements. University
of Illinois's Lawrence Keeley and Harvard's
Steven Pinker argue archaeological evidence of war is broad,
ancient, & barbaric and violence is declining. They
argue that archaeologists are ignoring the evidence to pacify
the past. Rutgers R. Brian Ferguson strikes back arguing:
Their evidence does not show what they claim and they
cherry-picked their data.

Sapolsky argues 95 to 99% of hominin history was spent in small
nomadic bands that foraged for edible plants and hunted
cooperatively. Few records exist: cave paintings from
forty thousand years ago which show hunting but not war.
So most people infer from the current day hunter-gatherer tribes
the: Hazda, Mbuti, Batwa, Gunwinggi, Andaman Islanders, Batak,
Semang and Inuit cultures. Mostly the men discuss how
fantastic their last hunt was while generations of females
provide the calories from foraging. Most hunter-gatherers:

Work fewer hours for their food than traditional farmers
do and they live longer and are healthier.

. But other behaviors don't fit that mold:
People forgoing reproduction, Individuals sacrificing themselves
for strangers.

Sapolsky sees broad evidence of human kin selection. But
there are complications:

Clan fighting occurs - but many wars show evidence of
families fighting on both sides.

Intra-family individual violence occurs

Patricide occurs, typically as revenge for abuse and
fratricide.

Parents killing children because of mental illness, abuse
that unintentionally turned fatal

Money is bequeathed to non-kin. Sapolsky judges that
our cognitive based kin assessment helps explain these
situations. If you 'feel' like a relative to me you
are a relative. And we can be manipulated into feeling
more or less related to someone than we really
are.

amplifiers enables us to accept
macro-mutational events. Still Sapolsky concludes that
depending on what genes are being affected, gradualism and
punctuated change occur in evolution without the edifice
collapsing.

to become active. Establishing that 'They' eat
disgusting things assists with deciding that 'They' also
have disgusting ethical ideas. People with a low threshold for interpersonal
disgust have strong out-group views.

Multiple categories of 'Us' and crucially which 'Us' is
most important constantly shifts.

Taxonomies of 'Them' -

Race intuitions are broad based and cross cultural but
are folk-science. Race is a biological continuum,
not a discrete category. Hunter-gatherers would be
unlikely to meet people of different skin color. And
the clasifications vary by culture not biology.
Classifications can evaporate rapidly depending on
circumstance.

The specialization of some ranking systems - while high
ranking chimps generally excel at related areas, humans
specialize deeply and build hierarchies around these
subcultures. It is not obvious these skills
generalize.

Internal standards that don't depend on the real world

The view from the top, the view from the bottom

Rank is so important to humans that we dedicate brain activity
to judging it:

activate and couple
together when a dominant face is detected probably
indicating mating goals are being evaluated. And we
are interested in what dominant individuals are thinking -
the superior
temporal gyrus is involved in:

Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo - Three experiments that show
situation matters & that some normal people can be
coerced into doing terrible things. Asch's famous line
length matching study showed how groups could influence the
subject to conform to a wrong selection 30% of the
time. Milgram showed subjects would inflict pain on
another human when told to do so by an authority figure in a
uniform. Zimbardo got Stanford college students to
dress & behave as guards and prisoners with resulting
brutality to and degradation of the prisoners.

Situational forces and what lurks in all of us - Zimbardo
concluded that a bad barrel can turn all the apples
bad. He argued for a public health approach to
blocking such environments.

Some different takes - Psychologists became outraged at
what the subjects had been manipulated to do. And Zimbardo's
role as superintendent, where he set the rules, raises
concerns. Without him the prison experiment has not
replicated accurately. Sapolsky stresses that some
apples don't go bad.

Modulators of the pressures to conform and obey include:

The nature of the authority or group pressing for
conformity

What is being required and in what context

The nature of the victim - once they are known
personally they are less likely to be victimized

The primacy of reasoning in moral decision making -
Sapolsky notes all societies introduce rules about moral and
ethical behavior. Applying the rules leverages trained
lawyers and requires building scenarios, identifying
proximate and distant causes of events and estimating magnitudes
& probabilities
of consequences of

Again with babies and animals - there is additional
support for implicit assessments indicating human morality
transcends our species boundaries.

Mr. Spock and Joseph Stalin - Sapolsky notes that while
philosophers and Star Trek's Mr. Spock want morality to be
logical Joseph Stalin
understood that relatives are special. That
holds true except for people with vmPFC damage who are then
happy to harm kin.

is involved in these
conflicting emotional choices - monitoring the conflict
between reality and the lie and slowing down the thought
process slightly. Sapolsky notes that transcranial
direct-current stimulation shows the dlPFC drives the
lie. And it is involved in pushing to be honest.
People who were capable of cheating used the dlPFC, vmPFC is ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is: